Design Justice Strategies for Design Education: Evidence and Recommendations From Syllabus Analysis

Abstract

Abstract The need to embed equity, ethics, and justice considerations in design education is becoming increasingly crucial to ensure we cultivate and foster engineers who can critically engage with and design for social challenges related to inequality. Previously, our team completed a syllabi analysis of design courses at a technical institution across six different departments (both in engineering and non-engineering fields) through a systematic approach guided by a rubric informed by design justice. Design justice, as conceptualized by the design justice Network, is a framework that explores how a designed artifact distributes benefits and burdens to various groups. As part of this analysis, evaluators of the syllabi provided recommendations for how the instructors could engage with or further embed design justice considerations in the course content. This paper seeks to elucidate strategies for engaging in design justice in design education by analyzing the evaluators’ recommendations from the syllabi analysis to understand what strategies can be used to further embed design justice into design courses. We reveal design justice education strategies related to each of the six departments, finding that there was a wide range of recommendations among the departments often focused on specific technologies related to the discipline but also broad recommendations as well. We synthesize the design justice education pedagogical approaches across the departments, providing a cohesive list of nine pedagogical approaches for design instructors to consider incorporating in their courses when wanting to engage deeper with design justice.